From the book review magazine “Books and Culture: A Christian Review” (to which I subscribe and which we have in our Seminary library should you ever wish to peruse it) comes another annual list – this one from a Christian publisher (Christianity Today) and with a Christian perspective (broadly Evangelical).

Here’s John Wilson’s introduction to and explanation of the list; follow the link above to browse the list. Once again, there are some good reads here.

As usual, this list makes no pretensions to identify the “best” books, nor even to include all of those that dazzled me in the course of a year of reading. But these ARE the ones that came most readily to mind when I entered the requisite trance and began writing semi-automatically on the back of an envelope—in this case, one I’ve not opened, from the Social Security Adminstration (#theagingbrain).

I should add that—also as usual—it was a good year forBooks & Culturewriters. It seems churlish to mention only a handful of their books here, but let these stand for a much larger number: David Skeel’sTrue Paradox: How Christianity Makes Sense of Our Complex World; Karen Swallow Prior’sFierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Like of Hannah More—Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist; David Martin’sReligion and Power: No Logos Without Mythos(excellent to read alongside Andy Crouch’s 2013 bookPlaying God: Redeeming the Gift of Power); Tiffany Kriner’sThe Future of the Word: An Eschatology of Reading; Daniel Taylor’s novelDeath Comes for the Deconstructionist; Scott Cairns’Idiot Psalms; andGlitter Bombby Aaron Belz.

So, here’s the list. The titles are mostly in alphabetical order (and the logic of departures from that will be clear), followed at the end by the Book of the Year. For additional thoughts on the Books of 2014, keep an eye out for a piece I’m doing forFirst Things(assuming it passes muster there).

This one in particular caught my eye, since I happen to like noted historian Mark Noll’s writings:

From Every Tribe and Nation: A Historian’s Discovery of the Global Christian Story. Mark Noll. + A Patterned Life: Faith, History, and David Bebbington. Eileen Bebbington. Mark Noll and David Bebbington are two of the finest living historians. Almost exact contemporaries, they are both deeply evangelical (they’ve done more than their share to form the evangelical mind), and they are good friends as well. It’s a treat to have these two books appearing in the same year: an unusually personal narrative by Mark, and a witty and affectionate account of David’s life and work by his wife, Eileen.